


Muhallebi

by Opera142



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, thick self-indulgent prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:48:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26235145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opera142/pseuds/Opera142
Summary: Yet another Joe and Nicky exchange war for peace fic.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 20
Kudos: 115





	Muhallebi

Nicolo awoke tasting blood, sour and barely red, like pomace made from grapes stomped over and over. The white slime of thirst silted his teeth, and despite taking his breath through his nose, he retched on the dank smell of his mouth. In the gray dim, he lay there, mired in his blankets and nausea, aware of Yusef sleeping, still as a doll, midway across the cellar.

Drifting over the rise and fall of Yusef’s breath were the morning sounds of this village: goats bleating and their shepherds hushing them as all trekked toward the grasslands to the south, not yet overly gleaned and free of the savagery and bloodshed ringing Jerusalem’s walls. Beneath his covers, Nicolo’s gut wound seethed, but he waited until the shepherds and goats had well passed before he peeled away his blankets and shirt and squinted at Yusef’s handiwork from the day before: a surprise attack with a dagger. A frantic, terrifying butchery, spilling his viscera in a jumble, every organ punctured and bled of its bile, his ribs piled in pyre, and the blade lodged within his heart.

The dagger was back with Yusef now and all necessary pulp and disinterred organs were returned to Nicolo and there had been only quiet between them since then. The wound throbbed. Wretchedly tender. New skin, disturbingly pale, streaked through layers of the old. He smoothed his shirt over the wound and cradled his hand over both. Thirst cobwebbed his throat. Nicolo did not reach for his canteen. Yusef would awake, as would he if Yusef turned to him in the night.

He owed Yusef a kill this day. Two, in truth, for he feigned sleep last evening, not able to stomach dousing either of them in blood again. Nicolo’s hand closed around the hilt of his sword, tucked between his pallet and the wall. Old blood squelched from the sodden leather. His spirit withered. His grip weakened. Soul and marrow pleaded with him to renounce for all time his ghastly role in this rampage of hewing flesh and rending bone and treading through gore and egregiously, ceaselessly, needlessly killing.

No more. Soul sick and weary, he turned his face heavenward, unsure if he were vowing or begging. Sweat slicked his sword hand, sloughing blood onto his palm. Nicolo recoiled, nearly losing his hold. He glanced at Yusef, sleeping and seeming at peace. No more giving his days to ungodly callings, no more blood and cruelty and killing.

Surety in his vow welled within Nicolo. Heady doses of calm and self-possession swirled through him, unbidden and without his consent, like breathing and dreaming. Dignities long denied him since deathlessness had foisted itself upon him all those years ago, tormenting his body with unsought, unwanted resurrection while leaving wounds to his mind and spirit healing unmercifully slowly. If ever.

From then through now, his prayers, calls for mercy, petitions for understanding, promises of supplication to His Will, if only Nicolo could know why-- all went unanswered. As with war and cruelty, Nicolo Di Genova was through pleading to know the purpose of his undying flesh. Until an answer came, this deathlessness was Nicolo’s to do with what he will.

Hope sputtered within his guts. Lit, but untended as his spirit shrank from the immensity of eternity and the unyielding compulsion of his fellow humans to fill every moment with cruelty and pain. Already, he missed prayer. Only in the matter deathlessness, Nicolo amended. With all else, as always, he’d pray as a conscionable man ought. Give thanks and hallelujah. A good covenant. Ministry for the days forthcoming.

As for this day, he remained bereft of all but two certainties: his soul is unwanted in Heaven and this crusade is not his way to salvation. He must flee. Leave the Holy Land. Die here in name. Lost with so many others. Slink away in the night and find his quiet escape from this bloodthirsty world. Hermitage where cloister failed

No, not hermitage. Sanctuary. He needs must turn his endeavors to the cares and ventures of this life. His life. Attend the work of his conscience. First by parley with Yusef. Offering truce and trust. Asking only to be trusted in return. Trust was not quite deep enough a word. Nor wide enough. Nor all-encompassing enough. Nicolo did know not a word that was for these guileless, lack-witted hopes.

Peace might be beyond them. But, Nicolo, foolish and soft-hearted and mild and too tame Nicolo knew, knew with unerring certainty that if they should split from one another now, they would restlessly maunder evermore through these war-torn lands, shambling in haggard pilgrimage year after year to reclaim each another. And yet, if he were to plead these thoughts aloud, Yusef would rightly judge him addled or naïve. Still, he would try.

To kindle his flickering resolve, he tallied Yusef’s daily charity: bread every day, and more than once, a soup of lentils and greens. Water, sometimes. These blankets, this cellar. Quiet hours to heal and rest and think. And the man, himself. Valiant, resourceful, clever as the devil. Strength, within and without. Shrewd. His acuity and his mettle holding fast through battle and loss and strife. Gracious ways with words and generous in sharing them. Nicolo had much to learn from Yusef. More to admire.

Nicolo’s fingers fell way from the hilt. He dozed again, awakening mid-morning. The sun slanted thick and golden through the cellar’s shutters. Nicolo inched his pallet into shadow, seeking to hide from the day’s heat for a bit longer. He knew, without looking that Yusef was not here.

But he was not abandoned. Yusef’s sword rested atop casks of dyestuffs, well out of Nicolo’s reach and in need of cleaning. Yusef’s prayer rug, his pallet, his few belongings, war torn and useless, were scattered about the cellar, mixed among Nicolo’s even fewer belongings. The sleeve of Nicolo’s ruined red shirt entwined with a blue sleeve of Yusef’s. Nicolo scoffed. Their possessions got on better than they.

Beneath their sleeves, lay Yusef’s pack. Its strap was slit nearly in two-- probably by Nicolo’s sword. Nicolo’s hand. And by his hand must come restoration.

Nicolo struggled upright. Pain thrust a fresh wash of sweat across his brow. Rivulets ran along his jaw, cascaded down his throat, coursed his sternum to pool in the cradle of his hips, mixing there with pus-sealed lacerations and strands of jellied blood. His shoulders slumped, creating a downward path for his chin. He closed his eyes, barely breathing, and his flesh beseeching him to shirk his fleeting vows of good will and idle away the remains of this morning, entombed under covers, sleeping through all his days as a poor trade for death. Instead, Nicolo shook off all his blankets except for the thinnest, bunched them together for a pile to lean upon. He flopped against his little cloth turret. Clung, in truth. Until his pain ebbed and he reclaimed his breath.

Clumsily, he floundered with his sword, scraping and clanging it against the floor and dulling its blade to snag Yusef’s pack. Before taking up his prize, he made sure the flap was secured shut; he had no wish to pry into Yusef’s private matters. He looked over the pack. Sturdy seams, the leather sound and well cared for. A good bag except for the strap. Nicolo examined its tear. An easy fix, though his craft work would not be as pretty as the original. He scrabbled through his own pack for his awl, and then for the worst of his shirts.

From the shirt, he salvaged the lacings and strips of cloth. With the awl, he bored holes a fingerbreadth apart into the leather. He plaited the lacings through the holes, suturing the tear, as nimble now at hiding the knots within the pattern as when he rushed through his boyhood chore of repairing fishing nets. His heart thrummed, taking much solace and cheer in the quiet work of making a rent thing whole. He tied off the last length of lacing and reviewed his work. A poor substitute for a woman with a sewing basket, but the strap would remain serviceable until a seamstress could be found. He pushed the pack to where Yusef had left it.

Now to clean Yusef’s sword. Nicolo flung off the last blanket, a more elegant gesture than his bumbling about while laboring onto his knees. He rested on all fours, head hanging, arms jittering. He’d count no aid from the last in the slow, clumsy work of arising. He pulled his canteen and pack to his side. Water for his throat, and within his pack, his dagger, if Yusef should return while Nicolo worked and suspected him of thieving, and a ramekin of grease for Yusef’s sword. Though, how much was left of his grease after weeks of copious use… he shuddered at the waste. And that foolish moment of reflection gave way to a dismal reckoning of this Crusade’s lies toll: young lives and fine horses and fleet ships and humble villages, and in the coming days, Holy Jerusalem, herself.

His fingers traced the goldwork ornamenting his pack’s strap, a prayer rope for desperate moments. Faith provided no more strength than his arms. He pitched forward, head and folded his legs beneath himself, rocking to his feet like a babe leaving behind mother’s arms. Swinging upright slammed his weight onto his jumbled guts. Nicolo wavered for a great while, wobble-kneed and new-kitten weak. His first few steps did not take him further than the length of his feet.

His breath stuttered. Shaking as badly as his legs. By the time he travailed that vast plain, the endless leagues of that cellar, the shaking deepened. Clattering his bones about and spilling the juices of his scored liver. Clutching the rim of the barrel that held Yusef’s sword, Nicolo wedged his leg betwixt it and the wall, creating a buttress for his hips against the lowest shelf of clay jars. A poor crutch for a poor wretch.

Gingerly, he lifted Yusef’s sword. Heavier than his, and a bit shorter and slightly curved, therein the banal answer to Nicolo’s battlefield puzzlement that despite Yusef having some height on him, their reaches were matched. The handle, made of bone wrapped in leather and wire, and capped with a nub of steel cast as an acorn, seemed fashioned solely for Yusef’s grip. The blade. Oh, the blade. Exquisite. A quality reserved for knights of legend and dragon slayers. Intricate craftsmanship, light as a table knife, and embellished with mottling reminiscent of rainwater. His breath condensed on the blade as Nicolo stared, momentarily dumbstruck. _Sinhala Wane_. Damascus steel. Art made extraordinarily lethal.

The barrel blocked him from stumbling back. His hand hovered over the sword, not audacious enough to dare touch again. Nicolo steepled his fingers together and whispered a hasty prayer that his ministrations would honorably serve this resplendent sword. He scraped his thumbnail on his shirt, clearing what muck he could before employing it to scrape blood—his-- from the fullers. Next, he took up a rag, swabbing the blade. Steady, smooth strokes, always in the same direction, minding his fingers and the sharp foible. Soothing work. A balm to his spirit. A joy, for once in these harrowing months to have his hands occupied by caretaking rather than butchery.

As supposed, his ramekin of grease proved nearly empty. Enough for this polishing of Yusef’s sword and no more. Nicolo glanced back at his sword and called out an apology. His sword was of good steel, and in this dry land, if he were to keep his promise of not bloodying its blade anew, he’d fear no rust for a month or more. And if he and Yusef remained embroiled in this futile exchange of deaths a month from now, God help them both.

After a last admiring look at the finest steel he’d likely ever touch, Nicolo sheathed Yusef’s sword. He rested his sopping forehead against the splintered edge of the highest shelf of jars. Sweat spattered the wood. He wriggled from his crib of barrels and began crossing the interminable cellar, cosseting his wound and mumbling the prayers for Matins, though the true hours of the morning probably called for the offices of Prime or Terce. Nicolo clacked his tongue at himself. Slothful. The one man to journey to the Holy Land and return with more vices that he brought.

Ichor sopped his fingers, but he could not bring himself to look again at his wound. Healing came too slowly these last few days, strained by repeated deaths, incessant mutilations, ever watering the sand with his blood. Gladly, with ever-swelling gladness in his heart, he’d trade his last of gill of blood for a sip of wine. He sunk onto his pallet, flushed and exhausted by an hour’s middling work, burrowing his cheek into his deflating mound of blankets, and taking small comfort that the pain would prevent him from dozing again.

He stared at the ceiling, cursing in between uneven breaths, and then squirmed half-upright. Busy hands would help him ignore the pain and think through how to broach a surcease of killing to Yusef. After re-sculpting his blankets and abutting his idle backside against that unstable tower, he tasked himself with collecting the clothing within the half-circle of his reach. Separating their shirts, sorting them by repairable and the ones best served by cremation and prayers chanted over their ashes.

While turning one of Yusef’s shirt right side out, a whiff of sootiness enriched by tannin and iron caught his nose. Faint and familiar, the monastery smell of ink. Black streaks ringed the cuffs of the shirt he held. Quickly, Nicolo picked through Yusef’s pile of shirts. Ink stained the cuffs of each, the same splotches marring the cuffs of Nicolo’s left behind monk’s robes.

What words had Yusef copied? Nicolo thumbed over the whorls of ink, as though he could read Yusef’s past by touch. He did not think Yusef’s faith kept monasteries, but with or without monks, their Quran needed copying. Some rich lands to the east esteemed the Greeks, doing lively trade with Byzantium for the ancient texts of Greece and Rome, and every few years sending fur-draped and jewel-laden emissaries to Nicolo’s monastery to pillage their archives in pursuit of the pagan works of Old Rome and Greece. In particular, Pliny and Strabo. Of which their meager library had none.

Those furry, bejeweled emissaries should have withheld their bribes to Bishop Augurius and saved their eyes—most of their library consisted of molding copies of Ambrose’s interminable 91 Letters and Commentaries on the Gospel According to Saint Luke -- Genoa’s middling stock of ancient texts, and thus, the bulk of like texts with Ligurian lands, burned decades ago when Genoa was set to torch by the Fatimid. Any vestiges of Old Rome lay rotting in the marshlands.

As a child, Nicolo had lolloped and played among the town-sized ruins of a Roman _castra stative_ and its _horreum_ —frittering away warm, autumn afternoons exploring the rubble with his brothers, Cristofano and Averardo, while they were supposed to be watching the harvest come in at their father’s rural holdings

In last month of his fourteenth year, they sidetracked through the Brevenna marsh to clamber in the ruins of a Roman _mansion_. While his brothers cast stones into a well, storied to be both bottomless and cursed, Nicolo lingered in a traveler’s shrine, encircled with battered statues and scarred frescoes of nude Mercury. A pagan sanctuary, untended for centuries, and bearing the scars of Godly displeasure: ruined walls, crumbling plaster, scores of holes left after the marble had been carried off.

Quietly, very quietly so he would not attract notice from his brothers, Nicolo tread across the sanctuary floor, soft and giving beneath his boots, the once yellow and blue tiles spoiled by water and split by reeds of papyrus sedge. The must of lost centuries tinged the crisp autumnal air, a tickle of tomb dust amidst the froggy smell of moss.

Minutes scurried past, hounded away by the splashes of rocks down that well. Soon, his brothers would run out of rocks. He should join them, before they and their penchant for depredation found this trove. And yet, he crept deeper within, so enraptured by this tranquil decay, all this beauty nowhere else in his life. Nicolo approached the stone god, stood so very close. Barely a breath apart. He drew a finger over Mercury’s stone wrist, trawling over sculpted muscle and masterfully intimated strength, and wishing so intently to feel a pulse. As though his longing could spark life as easily as his body stymied death. But Mercury’s heart and form remained stone.

Nicolo flitted the backs of his fingers over stone sinew. Shivers marauded across his arms, blanching his skin in the same way he’d seen flushes gleaming on his brothers’ flesh as they leaned close and stroked the cheeks of the pretty daughters of local lords. He bent his head, wondering if his fate was to become like this lonesome god. His self-willed flesh hardening from the outside in as he endured on, long beyond everyone else, leaving him alone and waiting a thousand years for another to seek his pulse.

Nicolo looked not to the god’s blank eyes, nor his bare chest. He allowed the pads of his fingers to roam over the pale marble, coming to rest in the bowl of the god’s elbow, the most precious nook of the body, Nicolo decided then, made for grasping, holding, kissing and so obdurately ignored by poets and troubadours. That one graze of a stone god’s forearm, those few moments of desire, the only yearning he’d known. Until—

Yusef entered their cellar carrying with him a jug and a basket of food. “It is morning,” he said, gruffly.

“And we have lived to see it.” Nicolo returned. They made a mess of each other’s languages, and their conversations were a fool’s cant. But such speaking worked for them. As most things between them seemed to, almost from the start.

“I have brought you breakfast. But first, we wash.” Yusef presented a clay basin, not quite half full of tepid water. Perfumed with roses and yarrow petals. “We will not insult Meral’s food with dirty hands.”

Nicolo waited. Yusef nodded him on. Obediently, Nicolo dunked. Water sloshed against his wrists and the yarrow petals slipped through and around his fingers like gianchetti nipping his toes during summer swims. Briny scents of the Ligurian sea swelled through him. He shook his head, wanting none of what those memories dredged. He ground his fingertips against the rough clay, to pare down raggedy nails and flush the dirt embedded underneath.

Yusef offered a clean towel, but when Nicolo reached for the cloth, Yusef swaddled his hands. Held them close while rubbing away water and grime. All the while looking into Nicolo’s eyes. Viscerally intimate, an act of gracious amity. Yusef finished his ministrations with a pat, lingered there for a moment, his thumb sliding along the ridge of Nicolo’s knuckles. Not quite a caress. Nicolo nestled within Yusef’s grasp for as long as he dared, then withdrew, skin tingling.

Yusef handed over a bowl of pale mush. “Be thankful. This breakfast is given to you from Meral the sister of Tekil the shoemaker. As a cook, she is gifted as no other.”

Nicolo stared into the pap, wishing for the generously offered and outrageously complimented porridge to turn into a slab of _pissaladière _. The rations in his pack had run out days ago. Since then, he’d been dependent on Yusef, and Yusef, his enemy, his murderer, his innumerable-time victim seemed to consider it his sacred duty to be a beneficious host.__

Yusef busied himself washing. No longer gazing into Nicolo’s eyes as he asked, “Have you a loved one in Genoa?”

Nicolo curled onto himself. His soul stank. A rotten onion, his layers of lies and transgressions. “No, no wife. I was meant for the monastery.”

Yusef dried his hands on the clean side of the towel and gazed at Nicolo with a tenderness that made Nicolo gulp. “I’ve heard you curse and seen you sin with no remorse if the deed hurt no one beside yourself. I do not disparage your love of your God, but you do not seem to me a man besotted with faith.”

“I am a third son, and that is how the matter of inheritance is settled in my home. The eldest son claims all. The second is sworn to the defense of Genoa. The third is given to God.”

“You are allowed no choice?”

“Some, yes. The monastery was expected of me and the monastic life seemed the easiest way… to hide,” Nicolo admitted with all the shame his words were due. “All my childhood, I had nightmares of my severed limbs crawling through bogs and graveyards, dung heaps and dungeons to convene at the pike that pierced my head. Those went away when I began dreaming of you.”

Yusef scowled, always misliking talk of their dreams. The work of a great evil, he’d scold, playing with their minds as a means to tamper with their souls so Nicolo asked quickly, “And you, how are you faring?”

“Well.” Rather than quibble as Nicolo searched for remains of their last skirmish, Yusef lifted his shirt to show unmarred skin and a fresh growth of chest hair. A scar curved the length his last rib. He followed Nicolo’s gaze and said, “When I was younger and not so durable.”

Nicolo nodded. In his younger years, still susceptible to sicknesses, his bones taking the usual time to mend, the scrapes and cuts due a boy with two older brothers holding fast day after day, he’d felt a pompous repudiation throughout his body as though broken noses and bleeding knees were rites of passage to be surmounted and then left behind, rescinded alongside other childish vulnerabilities. And when he’d reached his full height, there came a settling in and fixing of matters, and thereafter, his blasphemous resistance to the mortal laws of sickness and killing blows, and unnatural induration, as if his body had decided on its form for forever and always. “When did you know?”

“Knowing and accepting that knowledge are far different things.” Yusef said, too quietly. “Knowing came just before I turned twenty, though I had suspected for years, ever since I—" Knocking rattled the cellar’s door. Yusef whispered, “Cover your head,” and collected his dagger.

Nicolo burrowed beneath his blankets. One hand crooked, ready to coil a blanket about his arm as a shield and the other clamped his sword. Yusef shouted, “Yeah, okay. Peace be upon you as you interrupt my breakfast,” as he went to the cellar door. Beyond Yusef’s greeting, Nicolo understood very few words, all uttered rapidly and in an unfamiliar dialect, the accents spritelier than Yusef’s, throaty and the next word began before the last had finished. Two voices besides Yusef’s, that he could discern. Friendly enough, in the back and forth. Yusef chuckled in the middle of his words, soothing to Nicolo whether that laugh was meant for his ears or no.

“Three of woad, two of reseda,” Yusef called out as he stepped past Nicolo, crossing the cellar in a few, brisk steps. He stopped before the shelves, humming while he tinkered, poesy little notes bobbing among the sounds of clay sliding over wood and the clink of jars as he gathered an armload.

Nicolo peeped through a care-worn patch in the blanket when Yusef again passed by. After handing off the jars, Yusef leaned crosswise across the doorway, one hand on the wooden frame. His questions about the battles outside of Jerusalem were answered with sparing replies. The men at the door talked of the Christian dead, the Crusader ships captured in the chaos reigning in Malta, and the supposed armies of al-Afdal Shahanshah amassing in Ascalon and posed to swoop into these lands any day now, which brought mention of a interrupted tabula tourney in Timorim, and with that, their talk moved to tabula strategy and games of _qirkat_ , boasting and spates of laughter, genial and low. The languor of gossiping on a hot day, metered by the pitapat of Yusef’s silver rings clacking against the door frame. From far off, shouts of greeting floated above the street noise. The men at the door called out in return while also still chatting with Yusef. Two or three conversations clattered on all at once until Yusef threw up his hands and declared, “My breakfast misses me.”

“He speaks of missing his breakfast but not his wife,” teased one of the men. The other followed with outlandish sniffing and making hungry jokes about lavish spreads of halva, knafeh, lamb with raisins, meat pies, shashlik, jallab poured over mountain ice, and women who were no one’s wives. All voluptuously described as though they could outtalk the scarcity and strife ahead, regardless of who held Jerusalem come harvesttime. But soon enough, shade overtook their cheery moods, and gloomily, they began the amaranthine ceremonies of traditional goodbyes.

Nicolo’s gut grumbled and his nose vowed these stifling, stinking blankets would follow their shirts onto the pyre. One, blue wool with round patches of green, Nicolo could claim as his, a gift from his mother when she learned he was leaving the monastery to embark on God’s Crusade. The rest? Yusef could not have been hauling as many as these in his pack. These blankets had multiplied over these last blurry days, just as Yusef’s pallet shuffled towards Nicolo’s.

Each night, they bedded down that much closer. Still not near, and Yusef might simply be laying the room for a broken peace and a sword in the night. Their routine had been to kill each other once a day. Usually Yusef in the morning, and Nicolo after the evening meal if they had any; around the time the Star of Venus rose in the evening sky if they didn’t.

Tonight, whether feast or famine, Nicolo would stay his sword. As Yusef had stayed his, this morning. He scrabbled for words that might find Yusef’s moral center even if surging past in a deluge of blood. The men at the door finished their final swapping of peace and well wishes. The cellar door thumped closed. Yusef locked the door, wandered in silence for a bit before circling back to Nicolo. Before Nicolo could lift his sword, his blankets flew away. Yusef stood over him, still clutching his dagger.

Its blade caught the morning sun and flicked scraps of light throughout the room. Nicolo squinted, following the light as he readied his confession. “I cannot take your life again.”

With a sigh, Yusef sat on the floor, across from Nicolo, and placed his weapon between them. Weariness bent his back. “If we were meant to meet, the reason was not for one of us to kill the other. That we have proved.”

“We will lose our souls to this vileness.” Nicolo paused before his plea strayed onto pietistic or foolishly tender pathways. “This hate we’ve been taught of each other, of ourselves, of nearly everything, for the whole of our lives… I refuse for my unremitting life to mean naught but more years of slaughter and ruin and carrying others’ hate in my heart. Malice is not your usual way either, I think. The cuffs of your shirt are stained by ink.”

Yusef’s fingers contracted, hiding under his sleeves. Ink stippled those cuffs. too. He brought them to his lap, his gaze soon following. The angle, Yusef with head bowed and Nicolo watching from below, gave Nicolo his closest study of a mostly healthy and free of bloodlust Yusef. Dark lashes, darker eyes. The sincerity within them. Handsome, though that rarely coincided with a good heart. But in Yusef’s case, both imbued the other. Yusef remained quiet for a while, thinking through Nicolo’s plea. When he spoke, his voice was overly soft, as though warning a naïve child of the cruelties lurking in the world. “Genius is no sign of benevolence.”

Genius! Carefully, Nicolo asked, “Do we have agreement between us?”

“Yes, another. Soon we’ll need to retain a dozen councilors of the law and a stout donkey to carry our contracts.” Yusef rose and paced the cellar. His many silver rings dented, spangled with divots caught the light as Yusef’s dagger had. Amid, his third to and fro, Yusef’s pace flagged. With his ragged clothing, unwashed face, and weary stance, Yusef looked like an old peasant shuffling through dust, as if their folly of blood and death had ruined him. Yusef showed his dagger, “Shall we bind ourselves?”

Nicolo raised a hand to block Yusef’s offer of more blood. “It is enough to swear. We’ve unthinkingly swapped blood oaths a hundredfold.”

Yusef smiled at that, and after another stubborn tour of pacing, he sat once again. “We are two strange creatures, unused to trusting anyone, and needing to bind our fraught alliance with faith in each other.”

“Trust will come. Worthy recognizes worthy. Until then, we’ll console our dormant swords by claiming our togetherness is necessary business. Born of waiting to know the purpose behind our flaunting of death.”

“Maybe we are meant for nothing. These lives of ours are mere missed stitches in the grand carpet.”

Nicolo swallowed, tasting his unwashed mouth. He’d had his fill of desultory living. Trundling through his days, apathetic and uninspired, whilst holed up in the monastery. Indifference, too, chafed against his nature. Much of his joy came to him in acts of caring, in caretaking, in being taken care of.

“Eat,” Yusef nudged Nicolo’s bowl of porridge. For himself, he unloaded a banquet from Meral’s basket: a covered pot of ful, thick slices of grilled halloumi, dried apricots, and unleavened bread.

Nicolo faced his pap. To eat this gruel was to admit weakness when he should not. And yet, to spurn shouted rudeness. He exhaled. Arid breath scoured his throat. For the moment, he could hide his reluctance behind the practical “My canteen is dry.”

“Ah, sorry.” Yusef set aside his bowl. “I brought tea.”

“Wine?” Nicolo asked.

“Not in this village, alas. And, not from me.”

Nicolo flushed, both in contrition and disappointment. He crossed himself and said, “I ought to have thought before I spoke. I am far from home.”

“As am I. Called from my home near Tunis to defend this land.” Yusef uncorked the jug and poured a cup of tea for Nicolo. Steam meandered over his knuckles as he passed the cup to Nicolo.

“From far away, and already you bask in Meral’s good graces and cooking?”

“A cousin,” Yusef said, and nothing more. He was not lying, Nicolo knew, but also the words were not truth in themselves.

Nicolo stared into the murky brew. Drearily probable that Yusef was wielding poison instead of his sword. A good plan. Nicolo waited until Yusef poured a cup for himself from the same jug. Yusef tasted his tea and frowned. He dug through his pack, excavating a small leather pouch. From within, he drew a pinch of white grit that sparkled like sand and sprinkled them into his cup. He sipped, frowned again, and when he did so, his nose scrunched in a way that struck Nicolo with the same yearning as when he had dared to skim Mercury’s stone wrist.

Nicolo took his cup and drank. Bitter like medicine. But his thirst did not care, and his throat was grateful. Too late he thought, maybe, the sparkling white sand worked as an antidote for Yusef’s cup. “I wonder if—"

“No,” Yusef answered. He pretended to be very intent on his tea. Sprinkling more granules and sipping and sprinkling and sipping until the cup was to his liking. “At least from thirst, which I think answers the matter for hunger as well. When you re-awake from such a death, you wish you had not. Something vital is consumed and it is slow to return.”

After a bite of cheese, Yusef said, “I am thinking how to say… a pacer? One day, the Grand Astronomer of the Palace finds me in the copyist chambers, bent over _Almagest_. He hands me two jugs of water and a packet of dates and says I must walk from Tunis to Constantine. To fetch a book by Aristarchus and to count my steps along the way. The pay would be a jingling sack of gold and his favor.”

“Someone paying for your footsteps!” Nicolo laughed. Yusef’s pout and puffed chest utterly encouraged more laughter to burble. Nicolo laughed and laughed, shaking his poor belly until his gut wound threatened to gape again. “Oof. Still trying to kill me.”

“And thus ends the story of how I learned that dying of thirst is as momentary as the deaths by blade or arrow.” Yusef’s moue bloomed. Oh, he could sulk. He scooted away from Nicolo and scraped his bowl for the last of his favas.

Their truce was precious. And even without agreement between them, Nicolo would not take a death this day, but he could harry. Joust without breaking bones. “To what end were your footsteps worth his gold and favor?”

Yusef was slow in answering. Still pouting, then. “Predicting eclipses and something about shadows and angles and degrees. Somehow that will tell us how calculate the distance from here to the moon or the sun.”

Nicolo shoved his tongue against the roof of his mouth and held his side should he fail to rein his laughter. “So, you and the Grand Astronomer will soon be off on a holiday to the sun?”

Yusef’s cheeks glowed rosy. “No, but I’ll not argue a journey to the moon. For an uninterrupted rest. Dark and cool and quiet. Think of the stillness and peace there must be on the moon.”

All his laughter and teasing caught in Nicolo’s throat and before he thought how soft sentiment might be taken by Yusef, he said, “You are a romantic.”

“Whenever you speak on the matters of love and romance, you fling the words like an accusation.” Yusef said, his pout gone now. “Odd for someone who astounds me with his kindness.”

“I once tied your entrails around a thorn bush.”

“Yesterday I stacked your organs one atop the other and then toppled them, and your first work this morning: cleaning my sword. I watched you on the battlefield, Nicolo. After the first day, other than me, you killed no more. You sat with the dying, holding their hands, cradling them against you, providing your shoulder for their tears. Closing their eyes. And not just your people. I saw you go among mine with the same kindness. Kneeling beside them, in the mire and gore, offering water, staunching wounds, adding your voice to their prayers and pleas.”

Nicolo ducked, like a child hiding his face from thunder. Accusations of kindness preceded scorn and beatings within his family. Especially from Cristofano. His fellow monks ranked benevolence among the worst of the drudgework required of them. As tedious as copying manuscripts. “Can you read Latin?”

“Some. I am better with Greek.” Yusef popped the last chunk of halloumi into his mouth. “The Greeks wrote most of the treatises on medicine. I took work as a copyist, hoping I’d find lore on what we are.”

“What answers did you find?”

Yusef’s words faded and he held his hands aloft. “None.”

“I suppose, all would not have come to this if you had.” Nicolo said, bowing his head. Out of habit, his hands folded into prayer. He straightened them on his lap. Two fingernails torn away by yesterday’s knife fight had regrown, pristine and shiny next to the old. They’d be cracked and stripped again soon enough.

Without answers to seek, by what license could he ask Yusef for companionship? Ask Yusef to declare his old life and all he’s know cracked and ruined, and to leave and go with Nicolo to wander the world in search of the pure and shining?

All these thoughts and questions, he held too tightly to himself, and Yusef prompted. “Always weighing your words on your tongue before gifting them to others. “

“My words are rarely received as a gift.”

“I find them amusing. Unless they are disparaging my footsteps.”

“Not amusing enough to share your cheese.”

“I don’t have a gut wound.” Yusef said as he used a scrap of bread to swipe clean his bowl, he tilted a look towards Nicolo’s belly. “That’s healing slower than it ought.”

“I’ve barely enough blood for a mouse. We’ve drained each other. A thousand feasts and another thousand barrels of wine could not re-fill me.”

“Let us hope a mouse does not creep from its hole in the wall, asking you to share.”

“No blood, no cheese. The mouse will tell tales of our inhospitality far and wide.”

“Bah, no one will heed a mouse with a gossip’s tongue.” At long last, they laughed together. Silly mirth intertwining with consonance. Lilting and dulcet, binding them in accord more surely than any solicitor’s contracts.

A middling draught of healing meandered through Nicolo, sluggish like a steam gone mostly dry in the hot months of summer. The tea—seemingly medicinal after all— or the laughter, a good medicine too, replenished emptied reserves. His stomach yowled at the smell of Yusef’s good things. But he would need to be content with the pap and more tea, and perchance a doze after. Or pretend to doze and watch Yusef as he went about his few tasks in his quiet and elegant ways. Praying or practicing his sword work, or if he thought Nicolo were deeply asleep, he pulled codices or sometimes, loose pages, from his pack, poured over them for hours, sometimes murmuring the words aloud. Their meanings went undeciphered by Nicolo, but their rhythms frolicked in the way of poetry.

Yusef sipped his tea, and Nicolo watched, hoping the magic of Yusef’s white sand had worn off so he would scrunch his nose again. Yusef met his look, the remains of their shared laughter lingering in his smile. “Do you need me to spoon the muhallebi for you?”

“I will manage.” Nicolo stirred his pap, recognizing the rice and milk and cinnamon. Sickbed porridge, except for the lavish seasoning with spices. He drew the bowl close, appreciating their scent. He scooped a spoonful, lest Yusef think he was about to gobble from his bowl. As with other medicines, he delivered the dose of pap with quickness, and chewed for hunger not for pleasure.

The porridge took up the musty taste of the tea. Dolefully, Nicolo spooned another mouthful. Chewed with all the drear duty of gumming through the Eucharist. All at once the porridge’s rich spices soaked past the tea’s bitterness. A thousand flavors tingled throughout his mouth; a whirlwind of lush pungency later becalmed by a milky bloom. Toasty and creamy and… Nicolo stopped chewing, tongue and thoughts stupefied. Both unable to believe the glaze of sweetness pouring through his senses.

Yusef was smiling. Wide and silly though his expression clearly stated he thought the silly one was Nicolo. “I told you Meral cooks as though all of Heaven have come to sit at her table.”

“Wonderous,” Nicolo whispered, unwilling to open his mouth and lose this first taste. None would ever astonish as this had. “I’ve never tasted sweetness of the like.”

“Your Genoa does not know sugar?”

Nicolo shook his head. Perhaps Yusef had passed over poison in favor of enchantment. If so, he’d take this sweet bewitchment over the spilling of his innards. “We have anchovies and wine, and in the summer, peaches.”

“I had a peach once.” Yusef said too quickly, artlessly, in a way that suggested he’d stolen more peaches than he would admit to. “From the orchards of the Grand Astronomer in service at the palace. A gift after I returned from my third counting walk. To the ruins of the castle in Kashan and back.”

“I hope you also got another sack of gold too.”

“Very little. Mostly _fals_. Copper.”

“I hope you likewise shorted the count of your footsteps.”

Yusef laughed, a hearty and rich sound. A wealth of joy. He turned from Nicolo to tuck away his little leather pouch of white, sparkling sand and noticing, at last, Nicolo’s repair to his bag’s strap. For a moment, ran his fingers over the weaving, trying its strength at crucial points, tugging at knots and winding the leather into a helix to access what remained of its pliancy. “For my sword and for this. Thank you.”

“I owe thanks to you. When you are not killing me and refusing to share your cheese, you have fed and hid me when not many would. Too much, you have done too much for me, your enemy and murderer. Everything but fling open the gates of Jerusalem.”

“Your brethren managed that task well enough without me.”

Nicolo winced. For the past few days, he’d had the luxury of putting their war out of mind. Guiltily, he wondered which of his shipmates survived to see the Holy Cross carried into Jerusalem. He felt no triumph, no pride. Just weariness. “May the Lord guide them to shower mercy upon the women and children.”

Yusef stowed away his pack, and studied their possessions strewn about the cellar, gathering them along with his thoughts. “We cannot live on Meral’s generosity forever. Will you return to Genoa?”

The last of the pap weighed on Nicolo’s tongue. Ponderously heavy, he could not chew. He swallowed the lump. “None calls for me from the whole of Genoa. Apart from the sea, I’ll miss nothing there.”

“Not even anchovies?”

“The world abounds with seas and the seas abound with anchovies.” Nicolo crossed his arms over his chest and cowered behind that shield. “And you? Is there a wife who paces her kitchen while waiting for you to finish the paces set to you by the Grand Astronomer?”

“No.” All truth in that tiny teardrop of a word.

“Is there one you wish to be pacing?”

Yusef struggled to smile. “Years ago, there was one I asked, but the answer was no.”

“None since?”

“For many years after, I preferred relishing my misery over seeking love anew. And then I dreamt of you. So similar to he who said no.”

He! _Belin_! Hundreds of questions fluttered by on the winged sandals of Mercury. All too fleet for Nicolo to pluck from the air.

Yusef watched him intently. When Nicolo did not speak, Yusef apprehensively loosened the flap of his pack, and showed Nicolo his meager cache of drawing charcoals and scraps of flaxen paper-- gifts from the Grand Astronomer—and his codices. “Regardless of what fate had intended for me here, good or ill, I was done with my tepid life in Tunis. I gave away all I owned excepting the few things that bring me contentment. I do not yet know where I’m to go, but when I land, I will build a well-lit home, full of books and music and laughter and love and all the ebullience of a spirited life.”

“What became of your rooster with the fiery comb? I dreamed of you and that regal creature. A quiet evening, breezy and cool. You were lingering near the coop, enjoying the company of your chickens and the night’s early stars, reluctant to go into your house.”

Yusef smiled readily this time. “Bahram made a fine gift to the Grand Astronomer.”

“You do not fear he’ll goad that creature to Cathay and demand a count of his footsteps?”

“No one goads Bahram.”

“I will pray each evening for the Grand Astronomer to be more generous with his peaches to Bahram than he was to you.”

“Oh, he was generous,” Yusef admitted. “Though, he did not know so.”

“For shame,” Nicolo spluttered, too awash in burgeoning laughter to chide properly.

Yusef’ eyes lit with a wry twinkle Nicolo hoped to see again and again. “If we cannot die, we cannot go to Hell.”

“The Lords of Hell are greedy; they will come eventually for the sinners they are due.”

Yusef grabbed his dagger and admired the glint. “Let them come.”

“No more weapons and oaths of violence. We’ll first seek to subdue the demons within before we challenge all of Hell.”

“And from which fair land will we build our citadel and oust our demons?”

“Where doesn’t matter so long as my nights rattle with jugs of good wine, my days offer an hour or two for bobbing in the sea, and every morning I am awakened by the squalls of seabirds.”

Yusef laughed. “You make music of the mundane.”

Mundane. Yes, that. Ordinary. Nicolo tamped down a smile. Earthly cares and woes. No great mystery, anymore, why his stomach labored to heal. Crammed and glutted on God and war and deathlessness and other inscrutable flummery. From this moment on, he’d leave the pondering of abstruse polemics to the sophists and pedagogues. The remainder of his days, he’d spend rambling with his herd of unruly goats through brindled hills stubbled with rosemary and gorse; coming home to find Yusef drawing beneath their peach tree or philosophizing with the chickens in the coop; leaving the table after the midday meal, proclaiming hands sticky with peach juice as an artless excuse to dabble near the waterfront and, of course, indulge in a swim; and later on, tarrying outdoors in the last light of the evening to fold clothing fresh and faded from drying in sea breezes. Ink stains still there, the blood stains long since scrubbed away.

Briny, quiet, and placid days and companionship with Yusef. Another wisp of healing wound through Nicolo’s belly. Tension sloughed from his shoulders. The sea, simple living, and someone to care for. Almost a poem, writ upon his bones. Psalm and precept and pith and purpose. Everything intrinsic to his spirit.

Within Nicolo’s core, a surety shifted into place, the same settling into forever he felt at his maturity. Though, in this matter, forsaking further perpetuity in order to establish a bulwark against immutability of his mind and spirit. Granting resiliency and endowing inner pliancy, the willingness to bend and cede and salve and stumble, to forge ahead and forgive and fumble, to endure and adore and esteem and honor, to frolic, gambol, tease and bother, to desire and despair and deserve, to believe and respect and serve, to support and snuggle and fall short, to swivel, meddle, tremble, and cavort

Yusef asked quietly, “As you are not going home, would you go with me?”

That, Nicolo had decided hours ago. “Depends on where you are going.”

“I’m told there is good living by the sea. Where, in the morning the seabirds squall, and there are wine and olives enough to make a man forget sugar.”

“You may bring all the sugar you wish, if we can leave and forget this war. Forget all war.”

“We’ll roam evermore, forever vagabonds, if we flee all strife.” Yusef scratched his beard, thinking. “Al-Andulus? Where Muslims, Christians and Jews have learned peace amongst each other.”

“Are there many cousins willing to feed us?”

“No,” Yusef gifted him with wide, full smile. Pure, like the sweetness of sugar. What sweet wonders had He Who Said No found in his taste of Yusef’s mouth? “But we will feast all the same. For anchovies in the sea are as many as the stars in the sky.”

“Perhaps, we’ll learn how to net the stars as easily and become fishermen of wishes.”

“We must leave the stars be. The stars are meant for all people. Why else would Allah string them across the untouchable heavens? High and out of reach of kings who would hoard, and bandits who would steal, and rabble who would smash them to dance in the gush of stardust? When a poor man has nothing to give, he can take the hand of his beloved, and offer the night full of stars and say, ‘Look, my darling.’”

“Incurable romantic!” Nicolo wagged a finger, and when Yusef blinked with put-upon innocence instead of rightly prostrating himself in shame, Nicolo chastised, “In Genoa, poetry in praise of nothing that can be profited from… atop of poetry itself offending sober minds.”

“If that clumsy sentiment is mistaken for poetry, woe to the people of Genoa.”

“In Genoa we say…” Nicolo bumbled some syllables and tongue-tripped over false starts before resorting to speaking the proverb aloud in Ligurian to figure out how finagle the saying into something meaningful to Yusef. “ _Son Zeneize, rîzo ræo, strénzo i dénti e parlo ciæo_ … uh, I'm Genoese, I seldom laugh, I grind my teeth, and I say what I mean.”

“You laugh as much as anyone. Most happily when dousing me in calumny.” Yusef declared, with such rapturous affront that Nicolo didn’t have the heart to ask what the word meant. “But if you insist upon cherishing and clinging tightfisted to the drab, coin-counting, unlaughing, teeth-grinding, taciturn life of the Genoese, then no more will I speak to you of the sea. Neither stars nor wine.”

“The anchovies will gladly receive the ardent paeans you formerly lauded over the stars.”

“If only the saying were: I’m Genovese, I seldom interrupt. To appease your Genovese pragmatic sensibilities, we will go to Ifriqiya. Scorning the delights of the ruins of Carthage, and the cerulean port and the medina and the souks and the universities of my old home in Tunis, we will enlist with the salt caravans of the Almoravid. With bowed head and our eyes set upon the road before us, lest we look upon the olive groves and the salt- dappled waters of the Sebkha Sidi El Han, we will trudge beyond the ruins of Kairouan, beyond even the Grand Erg, until at last, we’ll stand upon the shores of a great desert stretching from horizon to horizon. A roiling sea of sand.”

“To think, we traversed the width of the Mediterranean to finally meet in Jerusalem, triple the journey as between Tunis and Genoa.”

“Do not interrupt. From those dust-laden shores, we’ll depart into the Great Sahara. Weeks and weeks of plodding ever southward, wind-chafed and thirsty. Most men perish attempting the crossing. And yet many more clamor to take up the work and the challenge: taking blocks of spices and salt to Timbuktu to trade for bricks of their infinite gold.” There Yusef’s voice softened, despite his vows. “Nicolo, we would not die.”

“Must we count our steps?”

“Greedy Genoese heart! Avarice enough to bring tears to the eyes of God! Bricks of gold are not enough? You grub for payment from the Grand Astronomer too!” Yusef drew his nose into a charming snit and scrutinized Nicolo, returning often to squint at his ear. He retrieved the towel, fumbled with it until he found a clean patch. That, he dipped into the muddy basin and chased after Nicolo.

“Come here.” He dabbed at the crust of dried blood on Nicolo’s ear. “We’ll need not make a life’s work of wading through sand. Merely endure the treks for as much as we care to. And when we tire of deserts and thirst and Timbuktu’s famed libraries, we’ll take our gold and find refuge in a little village near the sea. Raise goats and a peach tree.”

“An olive tree.” Nicolo fought a yawn. His blinks stumbled, heavy with the need to doze again. “In Genoa, it is said that olive trees are planted by those who love their children. Yusef, we would live to see a planted seed bear fruit. Another spirit to share plentiful years with us.”

Yusef’s voice floated through Nicolo as gentle as his scouring was not. “To go about the world as you do. Companioned by a boundless heart that deems trees worthy of being called family.”

“If you knew my family, you would not consider being embraced as kindred an act of a boundless heart.” Before Yusef could nose into that confession, Nicolo issued his dodge. “How many died trying to cross? For us, the occupation feels unfair.”

“Unfair!” Yusef howled with laughter, the sound, even in jest, softly soothing to Nicolo’s spirit. “Most men would brag of a mighty constitution. Issue challenges to kings and gods, alike. Swagger across this Earth, demanding tribute and exaltations. And you, Kind Nicolo, call your boon unfair.”

“You do not?”

“No.” Yusef turned his handsome face towards the shuttered windows, shut his eyes and rested in the beams of sunlight. “No. At least not for this… no. No. Not at all, for any of this. Life bestows enough sorrows. I’ll not bewail not dying of thirst or privation. I’ll not lament that my travels go unhampered by broken ankles and bleeding soles. I’ve no wish to suffer fevers from the bites of spiders and fleas and scorpions and serpents, no matter if they afflict others.”

“God willing, after a while, we might find a way to gift our healing to others.”

“If we could, Nicolo, you would have shared out that healing a thousand times. Remember, I saw you on the battlefield. I know you tried all imaginable ways.” Yusef sighed, and his voice softened as he said, “And, I believe from the lowest depths of my heart, where I keep all dark and true things, that fate will see us pay dearly for this gift a hundred thousand times over.”

“Then we will confound fate by strewing the world with kindness a hundred thousand times.”

“Your eyes.” Yusef fumbled with the syllables, dropped his gaze from Nicolo. So unlike his brash way. As was this moment of him groping for words. He stifled himself twice before he straightened his spine and looked to Nicolo with his usual forthrightness and strength of conviction. “When you speak of doing kind works, your eyes shimmer and I cannot decide if they are green or blue. They are like the sea, serene and wild at the same time. I am buoyed by looking into them.”

A shine returned to Yusef’s dark eyes. Brightness Nicolo saw often in his dreams of Yusef but never during these terrible days of war and blood and killing. His ringed fingers reached for Nicolo, shying away at the last moment and contenting themselves to fiddling with a corner of Nicolo’s blanket. “Since we have been alone with each other, quartered together in this small space… no. Before this place. In the night, when we fled the battlefield and those who noticed us re-awakening, and I supported you in my arms, your side a mate with mine. We fit like we are pieces of an _ostomachion,_ making something beyond ourselves in the way we cohere.”

A sigh wracked Yusef’s chest. “It is not wholly, that I am done with killing and war, as much as a man can be, but also, since we have sheltered in this cellar, I have thought of what may lie ahead, and how we may snatch the best of all that awaits us. The years, Nicolo, since I have contemplated my future, or thought of any moment beyond the here and now. And, in _we_ rather than I. When I leave to seek food or hear the news, I am unraveled all the while. Wafting and weak. As if your heartbeat nourishes my body. As if you inhale so that I might exhale. As if you sleep so that I might dream.”

“Will I be forced to march through the desert if I declare you an unashamed romantic?”

Yusef swallowed heavily, hunger wrenching his face though they’d just eaten. “What’s shameful about love?”

“Plenty if you ask the Pope.”

“I am not asking the Pope. I am asking you.”

Nicolo inhaled and waited for the breath to leave his chest before he gave Yusef a stuttered breath, a sincere plea. “You ask me for words for nothing I have felt before.”

“Never before?”

None but Stone Mercury, if boyish adoration of perfection likened at all to this baffling, aching, enthralling, salacious affinity for Yusef. “No.”

“What an inept pair we’ll be. You with none and me having had barely one.”

“We will have centuries, I think, to secure for you another peach.” Nicolo winced as another bolt of healing shot though his guts, burning slickly through putrescence and cicatrices before guttering out in an abscess. Immediately, his body ransacked its dwindling blood and water and muscle for another bolt. Nicolo swayed with the need to sleep. “Do you suppose we’ll be spared of old age?”

“Vanity! Is that another Genoese sensibility?” A smile quirked Yusef’s mouth, the same devilry, Nicolo imagined, that he wore while stealing peaches.

“Just mine.” Nicolo took up the towel, folded it over and scrubbed the cuts crowding Yusef’s knuckles. These, too, showed hindered healing. This abattoir could not slaughter them, but many tortures wreaked worst ruin than dying. They must go. “Even if it must be to the sea of roiling sands, we need to leave this place.”

“I have lived in dry lands for my twenty-some years. I might be lured away from bricks of gold and mounds of spices by promises of the cool silver-green shade of an olive tree.”

“Roiling seas of sand and silver-green shade. It’s a balm to hear the beauty of the world and the people within and unnamable feelings as described you do.” Nicolo slurred the last of his words. Sleep stalked him. He shook his head. Clumps of dried blood fell, yanking free strands of Nicolo’s hair. He brushed them away without looking, concentrating instead on Yusef’s arresting face, the sweep of his cheekbones, the luscious fringe of lashes, dark hair springing in a hundred different directions as though it shared Yusef’s curiosity and zeal for all things of this world.

Not since stone Mercury had Nicolo looked upon a face with both admiration and longing. He’d learned to appreciate beauty as an aesthetic appealing in itself, to be sincere in his flattery to those daughters of local lords. Yusef, oh Yusef. His handsome face was worthy of twofold yearning: in looking, in wanting more.

Nicolo clamped shut his eyes, risking sleep. Sloth being a slighter sin than leering, and preferable to shameless gawking, and showing himself to Yusef as a man who ogled flesh while ignoring the virtues that sparkled within. Greathearted and far-thinking. Insisting on dignity for himself and all others Brave enough to offer love to He Who Said No, and in the aftermath, still bearing an incurably romantic heart. Learning and contemplating as he copied texts; Nicolo and his brothers in faith had been taught to read only to know God’s word; taught to write only to copy God’s words.

And Nicolo had not questioned that dim mindset of the Priors or his father’s oft-repeated claim that work is meant to be drudgery. Such creeds now stank of parsimony and cruelty after hearing of Yusef exuberantly striding through his life, intrepid and idle-wild, using his deathlessness as a way to see the world and its marvels. In fearing the deathless years ahead of him, Nicolo had wasted these last eight years by hiding himself away, timid and self-trammeled, within the monastery.

He was free now, of cloister, of hiding his heart and his deathlessness, of considering his life to be worth less than a pocketful of radishes. Nicolo’s insides fluttered, baby bird frightened by his new strange endeavor of prodding himself towards happiness. Beginning with learning to mark time as the gift God intended, using his abundant years to seek a vocation, a purpose for his life’s work beyond pleasing God or obtaining his daily bread. And once found, devoting his hands to that calling while tasking his heart and spirit with getting know Yusef in the strange and bare ways he knew himself, except without the loathing.

And, there, his stoniest challenge: to no longer loathe himself. To be undertaken while reveling in the merry adventures and the spectacles of the world. After a dip in the sea, if patience predominated among Yusef’s many generous qualities. And if a little stone house with a wine cellar and a roomful of Yusef’s books awaited him in between travels. Any seaside would do. In time, he’d intuit kindly ways to deftly entwine adventuring with his small hopes: saltwater and sea air, hearth and home. At the very least, as he deliberated and lurched and tripped on his gaffe-laden journey from deathlessness to life, and then galumphed onward toward expanding and enriching that life, during that laborious while he would not make Yusef’s life lesser. “I swear you will see the libraries of Timbuktu.”

Nicolo fumbled through folding the towel, unable to make the edges to land evenly. Yusef rescued Nicolo’s lop-sided handiwork, rolling the cloth neatly, leaving it atop Meral’s basket. “Nap on your oath while I return Meral’s dishes and give our thanks. I will tell her you called her muhallebi wonderous.”

Sleepily, Nicolo helped him load the basket. “I have some coins. Would a gift of them be appropriate to offer in thanks for our many meals?”

“In these times of misery, she and her family will appreciate the coins. They will have plenty need for them, I think.”

Nicolo pawed through his pack, gathering a share of coins by feel. “Maybe one of the little islands of the Greeks.” His tongue took its inspiration from the sea, of course. Blue and curative there as nowhere else. But for this, his thoughts drifted to land. Far beyond the sandy shores and olive groves, flitting to the citadels atop the low hills, ancient and fallen before the birth of Christ. Within their rubble stood the pagan statues kept out of respect to ancestors and in defiance to the Western Pope. With luck, he and Yusef might find another statue of Mercury—called Hermes, there—and he could watch and see if Yusef reached for the stone god’s wrist. If Yusef sought a pulse.

Or if his heart still belonged to He Who Said No. Nicolo fought the lull of his blinks falling heavier with each thought. He’d know soon enough, with or without Mercury’s intervention. Until then, Nicolo could offer the little he had. “I will help you with Latin if you will teach me your language and Greek.”

“Immoderately greedy, wanting two languages for the cost of one.”

Nicolo pitied Yusef, yoked to an ass such as he. “Greed is the merest of my faults. I will overburden you a hundred ways.”

Yusef latched Meral’s basket and scooted close. The closest Yusef had pressed without killing him. “I think, kind Nicolo, there is not a single confession you could utter that I would name a burden.”

“Dare accepted.” Nicolo murmured, receding into his blankets. Ready for sleep and nattering on and on about stars and pretend peach trees while the sun shone, and the work of the day went on around them. More sloth. Perhaps they ought to buy a stout donkey after all. Not to lug contracts and the expensive writs of causidici, but to ferry Nicolo’s lazybones. He wiggled onto his side, plying and shoving the blankets about as though fussing would make the floor softer and the room cooler. For a feverish and fretful while, he faltered on the edge of sleep, so very nearly at rest. Pain tethered him to the waking world. “Will you wait until I am asleep before you go to Meral’s?”

Yusef unfastened his pack again, retrieving a codex without needing to see which he grabbed. Obviously, a favorite. “Before you sleep, I will read to you. Our brains find calm in the repetition within poetry. Omar the Tent-Maker’s Son _ruba’i_ will help you heal and then, we may fly.”

“The morning, I think.” Nicolo waited for his guts to disagree, and when no dissent was declared nor gurgled, he said, “Well enough, at the least, to get us some distance from this place.”

“We’ll see,” Yusef murmured. He shuffled about the cellar, codex held open. Sinuous script and gilt botanicals flashed or faded as Yusef searched for light befitting of the Tent-Maker’s Son’s poetry. None proved to his liking. He resettled himself between Nicolo’s pallet and the shuttered window, his usual reading nook.

There, he sat with his legs folded like a monk’s pretzel, stretching the codex across his lap. He bided a while, statue-still, his finger holding his position on a page somewhere in the middle. As dedicated to ascertaining the room’s attention for his recitation of poetry as the priors before commencing evensong.

Nicolo rapped his knuckles on the sun-dried brick floor, intoning, “Begin,” laughing at himself, for a moment returned to the monastery, to the frosty workroom facing the low winter’s sun. Prior Galeazzo dallied at his desk, his petty wont in the slow, frigid moments after they completed their scroll of prayers asking for blessing upon this day’s toils. Nicolo and his brothers in Christ, stood in orderly rows, each at his writing podium, shivering and waiting for that “begin,” which allowed them to break the clasp of prayer and reach for their quills with one hand while tucking the other snuggly in the warm folds of their robes.

Once again within this cellar, far from frost and chill, Nicolo’s laughter drifted off, and he looked to Yusef. “I will tell you the story of “Begin,” some night when we are bored beyond imagining and more drab fare cannot possibly add to our stalwart burden. It will not be worth the wait. And now, you must read to me the words of the son who spurned honest tent making in favor of the vagaries of poetic life. No Genovese was he.”

Yusef choked on a cough, peeping at Nicolo as he bent to clear his throat. Perhaps Yusef’s dally was not solely angling for his audience to be obediently and satisfactorily enthralled or, worst that he had a displeased father who wanted a mason for a son. As the last of his cough bubbled way, Yusef locked eyes with Nicolo, and before a blink passed between them, he spoke from memory. “A book of verses underneath the bough. A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou… beside me singing in the Wilderness.”

Nicolo grinned, resting wearily on his crooked elbow. “You will recite poetry about wine but decline to taste its glory or cool your tongue with its tartness.”

“No prohibition on beautiful words.” Yusef answered, “And I might struggle to worship a God who abhors well-strung words.”

“As with Meral’s porridge, I must ask, how did you come by codices of this Tent-Maker’s Son’s poetry, and do not answer that he is a cousin.”

“No cousin. Two summers ago, when the heat was too much for pacing, The Grand Astronomer set me to copying The Tent-Maker’s Son’s books on mathematics. A note among them referenced his medical works. When I sought those, I also found his poetry.”

“Reading me stolen poetry. Yet another new sin for our wicked world. The angels weep, inconsolable.”

“Copied,” Yusef said, “I was being paid to copy Khayyam’s words, and I labored on just that.”

Nicolo cast away one of his blankets, tutting all the while. “Claiming we would need to hire solicitors when you have all their ruses of the tongue, twisting the law and truth to your favor.”

“That would make you the donkey.”

“Honest work. Shall I count my strides as two or four?”

“Oh, for a crop to send you braying through thicket and scrub and fen.”

“When we come to a wilderness, I will expect singing.”

“The poem intends for you to sing.” Yusef pointed at Nicolo. “Thou.”

“Tell Omar, the Task-Maker, I will be too busy with the jug of wine. We’ll share the bread.”

“We’ll piece out the bread with the peaches and olives and anchovies.” Yusef closed his codex. “And that will make for a blessed life… the next line of the poem is, O’ Wilderness, is Paradise not enough? Omar, the Tent-Maker’s Son some decades ago, nobly penned his advice to us. We who are denied heaven must build our little refuges upon this wild Earth.”

“To think, years of dreams and deathlessness for God so wanted for us to take up eternal bread-making.”

“God respects us enough to allow us to discern our own purpose. And he does not wish us to be alone.” Yusef took Nicolo’s hand, dallying, or waiting for permission, upon the ridge of Nicolo’s knuckles. Nicolo nodded. Yusef wrapped his elegant hand around Nicolo’s wrist, his thumb alighting on Nicolo’s pulse. Soon deathlessness would be the least of all they shared.

**Author's Note:**

>  _qirkat_ \- ancient board game  
>  _belin_ all-purpose curse word in the Genovese dialect.  
>  _fals_ coin used in North Africa during the time period.


End file.
